Seven published writers – DePauw English profs all – read their their work at a gathering Feb. 13 to celebrate the founding 20 years ago of the university’s James and Marilou Kelly Writers Series.
The series brings published writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoirs, plays and essays to the DePauw campus to read from their work.
“It’s a huge, huge thing,” says Eugene Gloria, an English professor and poet who coordinates the series. “It’s a way for us to really have a national presence because we are inviting national and international writers.”
The series also provides a forum each spring for DePauw’s writing faculty, an unusual wellspring of writing talent for a small liberal arts college, Gloria says.
“We do like to showcase that,” he says. “My own personal agenda for doing this … is really to attract more majors and to show who we have and the accomplishments of our faculty. It’s also just an opportunity for faculty members who are writers outside of just being teachers to show students that this is also part of our identity here at DePauw.”
Professors Debby Geis, Peter Graham, Joseph Heithaus, Gregory Schwipps, Chris White, Lili Wright and Gloria read at the 20th anniversary event.
The series was established in 1998 with gifts from Marilou Morrell Kelly ’55, who owned and operated Town House Books in St. Charles, Ill., from 1974 until she sold it in 1992. She died in 2014. Her husband James J. Kelly, who died in 1994, was an executive with Goldman Sachs in Chicago and former chair of the DePauw Board of Trustees.
Among the writers who have been featured over the years are Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States (2018); poet Natalie Diaz (2017), who won the MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” in 2018; Adonis (2015), a Syrian poet whom some have suggested should win the Nobel Prize; Khaled Mattawa (2009), a Libyan poet, and Terrance Hayes, an American poet, both of whom won genius grants in 2014; and David Sedaris (2000), a humorist, author and radio contributor.
Chen Chen, author of “When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities,” is scheduled for April 10 and Roxane Gay, who has written two New York Times bestsellers, “Hunger” and “Bad Feminist,” is scheduled to speak April 17.
Eugene Gloria read three of his poems at the Feb. 13 event, including “The Suitcase,” which first appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. It also will appear in Gloria’s forthcoming collection of poems, “Sightseer in This Killing City.”
The Suitcase
After Gabriel García Márquez
Once a man traveled from Manila
To Rome, toting his dead daughter
In a Samsonite suitcase hoping
For an audience with the pope.
Her body the odor of tidy linens.
Her skin maintained its olive glow.
He took her out as if unpacking
A Stradivarius or laying down
A lily of the valley on the settee.
The settee in the hotel where he was
Installed was green-and-yellow paisley.
He owned a tie in that pattern—
Ties inside a case with other ties,
Shoehorned boots in velvet sacks.
But where he was welcome most
Was often where he was his worst.
Grander than most, his suitcase
Once held the sultan of Brunei,
Desolate and cursing his handlers
Who knew he was good to go.
Another time he smuggled a modest
Booty of Poussin’s paintings, a bust
Of Diderot. A might, mighty
Fortress, a walled city of psalms
And shrapnel was his only reward.
Like Darwish’s country of words,
He was in search of land to speak in.
Neither miracles nor blessings
Were made available for the man
Wishing more for his daughter
Beyond passing freely through
The customhouse of heaven.
No grief was greater for a parent
Whose fate it was to outlive his child.
Stranger to light cargo, he became
A bearer of islands, an entire archipelago.
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